


Again

by Innwich



Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Breaking Up & Making Up, M/M, cross-faction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-14
Updated: 2016-08-14
Packaged: 2018-08-08 19:55:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7771033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Innwich/pseuds/Innwich
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sniper and Spy were supposed to be enemies on the battlefield; it was only right that they broke it off. However, after the end of the Gravel War, it would be years before Sniper saw Spy again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Again

“So.” Spy wiped at the thin red trickle on his chin. He didn’t notice that he had missed the wet flecks on the lapel of his blue suit.

Sniper licked a bead of blood off his lip where Spy had split it. The cut under his eye was closing but the skin around the cut was painfully bright red and would darken into a dull bruise by tomorrow’s morning. His knuckles were swollen and aching because he had been stupid enough to punch the sharp line of Spy’s nose.

When a dry gust of desert wind blew sand into his hair, Sniper realised he had lost his hat at some point in the fight. He looked around the abandoned truck stop and spotted his hat lying under a dirty gas pump. He moved to retrieve his hat from the sand, and jerked to an awkward stop when he saw Spy bending down to pick up the stinky cigarette that Spy had dropped. Last thing Sniper needed was for Spy to think he was trying to grab his cigarette from him. Nah. His hat could wait. Not like he needed much cover from the sun in the middle of the night.

Crikey, his hand bloody hurt. The fight hadn’t even been about the break-up.

Sniper had known the break-up was coming. He had known it after he had camped outside the BLU spawn room and shot Spy round after round without so much as a how-you-do because Spy had insulted his taste in cigarettes. He had known it after Spy had called him stubborn and uncivilised over his dining arrangement and he had bitten Spy on the hand for being a stubborn hypocrite that had refused to eat without a plate. He had known it after Spy had compared Sniper to a rutting dog when he could just say he didn’t like the hickeys Sniper had given him.

And Sniper had known it would be happening tonight at an abandoned truck stop twenty miles away from their bases, after Spy had broken radio silence and slipped a piece of paper into his pocket to tell him to drive out to ‘talk’.

Spy had done all the talking. He had prepared a neat, tidy speech with a ribbon on top of it about the annoyance of sneaking between the two bases and the impossibility of sleeping in a bed with a jar of piss next to his head.

Sniper had been fine with that. He had nodded and grunted at the right places because this would be the last time they talked and it shouldn’t end too unpleasantly. It would have gone fine if Spy hadn’t tried to make Sniper take back the watch that Sniper had given him last Smissmas. Sniper had told him, hadn’t he? He’d told him he wouldn’t take the watch back. He had never taken back a gift he had given out and he wouldn’t start now. But Spy had insisted and grabbed his hand, and Sniper had pulled back his arm in reflex and punched Spy in the face and broke his nose, and Spy hadn’t liked it.

“So,” Spy said again, dusting off his cigarette. He put it to his mouth and winced when he jogged his nose. “This is goodbye.”

It shouldn’t be so hard to squeeze out a goodbye. Sniper had had weeks to prepare for it. He had spent nights tossing and turning in bed, and he hadn’t remembered why the hell he had been keeping this thing between them running. Sniper could give a speech too, about how it was bloody unprofessional to shag people he was paid to kill and this thing between them was doomed to fail and it was better to end it before things got ugly.

But the words wouldn’t come out of his mouth.

Sniper was staring at Spy with mute parted lips and Spy was frowning at the blood dripping down from his own nose again. It was like being back in school, standing like a statue in front of a classroom full of boys and girls bigger than him because he hadn’t known how to solve the algebra equation on the blackboard.

It shouldn’t be so hard to squeeze out a goodbye.

“Goodnight to you too.” Spy must have thought Sniper was done. Spy pressed his handkerchief under his broken nose and fished out his car keys. His fancy blue sports car kicked up gravel and dirt when it sped down the road back to their bases.

Sniper was left standing at the truck stop, staring after the sports car, with his camper van parked on the side of the road and his hat sitting in the dirt and his pocket weighing down by the watch he had given to Spy last Smissmas.

  


* * *

  


Sniper’s flight back to Australia wasn’t due for another two days.

After Halloween and the whole fiasco with pushing the dead body of their employer’s brother to Hell had been done, Miss Pauling had come down to the base to hand the team dismissal letters a day’s notice to vacate the base. Sniper had left in his van once he had packed his guns and knives with him, while Engineer was fussing over the prototypes and drafts and tools that he had hoarded in his workshop. Before driving out of the Badlands, Sniper had taken a detour to take a quick look at the BLU base. The BLU base had been quiet as a crypt. No one had answered when he had knocked on the gates.

Sniper would have been lying if he had said he hadn’t been disappointed.

Now that he was unemployed, he had considered staying and trying his luck in the States. But he hadn’t been home for years, and it was about time he visited his parents and showed them he hadn’t been ‘maimed by the Yanks’ like Dad had insisted would happen. So he had booked a plane ticket and marked the day of the flight on the calendar hanging on the wall next to his gas stove and followed the highway that led out of New Mexico until he had gotten bored of looking at the same old desert scenery on both sides of the road.

Sniper didn’t keep track of where he was going. He drove slowly and stopped every so often to see the sights that he hadn’t had the time to appreciate in the years he had been in America: The farm animals and the rednecks and the hippies in the big cities. Instead of driving till he nodded off like he had in the Outback, he parked his van in rest stops early every night after dinner. He was getting soft or he was just too used to living on a base for weeks on end.

So he was sitting in his bunkbed in his boxers and singlet, and mending a hole in his sock, when he got Miss Pauling’s message on his Mann Co. issued radio.

“We’re gathering a new team to fight the robots that are invading Mann Co. facilities,” Miss Pauling’s voice crackled through the static on the radio. “You’ll be working directly for Saxton Hale.”

Nine positions would be open on the team. Mercenaries from both RED and BLU were welcome to join. Positions would be filled on a first-come, first-served basis.

“We have set up a new base in New Mexico,” Miss Pauling said. “I really need to get a full team together, guys.”

Sniper hopped out of his camper barefoot to look for a route marker. A state trooper came out of the restroom and asked him if he was fine. Sniper demanded to know where he was. It took him five whole minutes to convince the state trooper that he wasn’t on drugs and that he would put a bullet in the state trooper’s head if he didn’t tell him where they were now.

At the end of it, the state trooper was blubbering and begging for his life. It wasn’t exactly a challenge. The man had turned white as a sheet as soon as he had heard Sniper’s Australian accent. Sniper left the state trooper cowering on the ground, returned to his camper and drew a route from Pennsylvania to New Mexico on his map.

Later, Sniper lay in his bed, trying to get an early sleep, and was kept awake by the gas station’s light that was flitting through his thin curtains. He could still change his mind and get on that plane to Australia. He didn’t owe Reliable Excavation Demolition or Miss Pauling or Saxton Hale or anyone a damn thing. The only reason he was going back to New Mexico was he might see Spy there.

It had bugged him that he hadn’t said the many things he’d had on his mind to Spy that night.

Such as a proper goodbye.

The next morning, Sniper pulled out of the rest stop before daybreak. The birds hadn’t woken up yet and the highway was dotted with trucks rumbling steadily on the first leg of their delivery route.

Sniper made as few stops as possible. He pissed in the jars under the front passenger seat and ate the hare jerkies he hadn’t eaten because he had been having meals at diners for the last few days. By the time his flight to Australia was boarding, he had crossed six state line sand was driving through Oklahoma on I-40. He missed his flight.

The base for the new team was a farmhouse that sat on the side of a backcountry road. What had once been a cornfield was overrun by weeds that were tall as small trees. A dirt path snaked from the road to the front of the farmhouse, and the wooden fences that rang along the two sides of it were lying in the dirt and covered in tyre marks.

When Sniper drove his van up to the farmhouse, he saw there was a purple scooter and an ambulance parked under a tree. In front of the porch that looked ready to fall apart, was parked a station wagon, and Demoman was rooting around in its open boot and dragging a crated cube out of it.

An assortment of crates was piling up on the ground around him. When he pulled out a long, narrow crate from the boot and tossed it onto the pile, a ghostly voice moaned in pain from inside the crate.

“Quit yer belly-aching. Be glad I didnae leave ye at home in the attic,” .Demoman said. He peered around the boot of his car when Sniper locked the van and headed for the porch in long strides. “Bit late for Halloween, ain’t it, lad? Ye look like ye’ve been on another round-trip tae Hell.”

“Piss off, Cyclops,” Sniper said, stepping over the crates that were cluttering up the steps to the porch. “I haven’t forgotten what you said about the Queen.”

“And I’ll say it again when I’m less sober, ye kangaroo humper,” Demoman yelled from behind him. “Dunnae let the door hit ye on the way in.”

Sniper pulled open the screen door and the front door. There was a huge crack in the wood of the front door. Sniper shut the screen door and the doorknob wobbled in his hand.

“Aye,” Demoman said to the empty driveway. Sniper could just hear a faint ghostly voice muttering from the top of the pile of Demoman’s crates. Someone should take the stupid haunted sword away from Demoman. He talked to it, for crying out loud. “Aye, I hear ye. Better him than that other piss-throwing loony from BLU.”

Crazy drunk Pommy bastard.

Sniper ran into the BLU Medic and the BLU Pyro in the foyer. The two BLUs were hauling black canvas bags on their backs and dragging a body bag with them down a carpeted hallway.

“Oo, very good. We finally have a Sniper.” The BLU Medic gave him a smile that showed too many teeth. “I have been wondering when we will see you.”

“Yeah, sure,” Sniper said.

The BLU Pyro was staring at him from behind the rubber gas mask. But neither of them was pulling out their weapons. Behind the BLU Medic, something rusty red was oozing out of the body bag and soaking into the carpet.

“Don’t let me keep ya.” Sniper walked backwards until his heels hit the stairs, then he loped up the stairs three at a time before the BLUs decided they liked him better in a tupperware.

Like their old farmhouse base in Harvest, the sleeping quarters were on the second floor. The rooms flanked the short hallway. Each of the door was labelled with a class insignia. The BLU Heavy was carrying two knapsacks into his own room and being followed by Soldier doggedly, who was yelling at him for being a no-good BLU.

At the end of the second floor, right across the room reserved for himself, was the room labelled with the Spy insignia. The door was open.

Sniper could barely remember walking down the hallway and past Soldier and the BLU Heavy. His heart was pounding like a jackhammer and his ears were burning. This didn’t have to be hard. He was just being a good teammate, coming here to clear the air before they started working.

So his hand was sweaty inside its glove when he pushed the door open wider.

There was someone on the bed.

But it wasn’t his Spy. It was his old team’s Spy.

Spy looked up from the rolled-up socks he was unpacking from his red suitcase. He raised an eyebrow at Sniper. “Looking for someone?”

Sniper wanted to wrap his hands around his skinny neck and strangle him. Back on their old team, Spy’s five favourite pastimes had been smoking cigarettes, and sipping wine, and, complaining about the weather, and complaining about the food, and talking about how everything was better in France.

So what the hell was he doing here?

“C’mon, move your asses, guys. Miss Pauling wants us in the conference room,” the BLU Scout said, calling from the other end of the hallway. “We’re gonna hear what this new job is about.”

And it hit Sniper. He knew why Spy was here, why he came back for this job if he hated it as much as he claimed to.

Sniper had seen the pictures. Everyone had seen the pictures. Maybe Miss Pauling had seen them when she wasn’t showing up at the base to send the team to fight in a different desert town than the one they were fighting in. The pictures that had appeared under everyone’s door one morning, because Spy – the BLU Spy – had been a sore loser. All of the pictures had disappeared before that day’s lunchtime.

Spy was obnoxious, but he wasn’t cruel. He was just a self-serving wanker.

And because Sniper was a selfish prick too, he wanted to punch Spy in the mouth to make a necklace out of his teeth.

“Don’t give me that look.” Spy stood up from the bed and patted the front of his jacket for his cigarette case. “You heard the boy. We have a meeting.”

  


* * *

  


Sniper hadn’t thought about the BLU Spy much.

The Robot Wars had distracted Sniper and kept him focused on his job. Fighting robots was like fighting the BLUs: There were bullets and rockets and pipe bombs and fire and a lot of blood. When Sniper worked, the world narrowed down to the small circle of vision that his scope gave him.

Spy slipped into his mind sometimes when he was rubbing out a quick one in the shower. It wasn’t anything weird. Sniper always thought about his exes when he wanked. He had even wanked to the memories of that bloody nice blowjob that a truck driver had given him behind the grocery store last Friday.

But there had been long, quiet moments when Sniper sat behind a window and waited for his teammates to get in positions and waited for giant robots to walk into his line of sight. He stayed far away from the front lines and the faint sounds of Engineer upgrading his buildings were the only thing that reached him in his sniping nest. Stretches of silence like these left too much time for Sniper to smoke and piss and think.

Then maybe he thought about the BLU Spy a little.

His teammates didn’t come to find him when they were on the job. When they came looking for him, they always turned out to be Spy-bots in disguise. And they weren’t good sports about it either. The Spy-bots didn’t come up from behind him and drape an arm across his chest and kiss him on the neck before backstabbing him.

But the Spy-bots, dying on the ground in their blue metallic ties and suits and masks, looked close enough to the real thing to remind Sniper of the BLU Spy. Sniper sheathed his kukri and went back to his seat at the window, and thought about the thing he didn’t get to say to the BLU Spy.

  


* * *

  


After they had stomped Gray Mann’s team of old timers into the ground and stopped his robots from invading Australia, Heavy suggested they had a party.

There was some confusion as to whether it was meant to be an engagement party for Soldier and Heavy’s sister or a ‘thank-god-we-came-out-alive’ party, but his old RED team had jumped at the idea of free beer and good food. Demoman suggested inviting the BLUs that had fought alongside them in the Robot War too, and somehow they ended up sending invitations to everyone on the BLU teams to a Sunday barbecue at Engineer’s ranch.

The hardest part of getting the party up and running was telling Soldier that the BLUs would be coming. Soldier was close to throwing a fit and calling the whole thing quits, until Spy convinced him that there was no greater victory than flaunting the fact that they were alive in the faces of their former enemies.

They had a week to spare before the party started. Scout and Demoman had to go and check up on their mums, and Heavy and Spy and Pyro left to attend their own businesses. There was nothing for Sniper to go back to in Australia now that his parents were dead and he knew they were waiting for him on the other side of the veil. He mooched off of Engineer and lived in a spare guest room on the ranch. During the day, he sat with the horses to keep them safe from Medic, while Soldier went skinny-dipping in every water well on Engineer’s property. Engineer finally had enough and kicked everyone off of his ranch.

The weather was sunny and dry on the day of the barbecue party. Sniper didn’t have any nice clothes with him. Not like there had been anyone left to make him go to church after his parents had died. Sniper dug out a wrinkled plaid shirt from the bottom of his duffel bag and wore it with his uniform trousers.

Sniper went down to a grocery store to buy a case of beer, because his parents had taught him better manners than to show up at people’s houses emptyhanded, before he hitched a ride with a farmer that lived on the land behind Engineer’s ranch. He got off the truck just when the silence had gotten uncomfortable.

“Good to see you get here all right,” Engineer said, opening the wooden gate for Sniper. “It ain’t too much trouble finding your way back here, I hope.”

“Nah. Just got to ask around nicely until someone let me hitch a ride. Not many people were going this way.”

“There ain’t many folks living around these parts.” Engineer led him past the farmhouse and into the backyard behind it. “I’ve been planning to pick you up myself, partner, but Soldier came here early and you know how he gets.”

“No worries.”

The backyard was more festive than Sniper had last seen it. Red and blue balloons were tied to every tree. The fire in the barbecue pit was roaring under the barbecue grill rack. Sausages and pork ribs and lamb racks and burgers and corns were cooking over the fire. Jars of rubs and sauces and honey were laid out on a small round table next to the barbecue pit. Under the shade of a large oak tree, crowded by the mercenaries that had already arrived, beers and lemonades and jugs of sweet iced tea were sitting on a picnic table covered with a white lace tablecloth.

“I hate to tell you this, Truckie,” Sniper said, “but we’re gonna eat you out of house and home.”

“Help yourself. I got enough food to feed everyone and back.” Engineer smiled. “It’s about time y’all get a real taste of southern hospitality.”

Sniper put down his case of beer from the refreshment table, took a beer for himself, ignored Scout’s high-five, and found a spot at the edge of the yard where it wasn’t crowded with people. He drank his beer and watched the other guys talking and laughing and getting well on their way to being pissed.

Another car was rolling up to the gate of the ranch. Sniper couldn’t tell how many REDs and how many BLUs had arrived. It seemed like everyone was wearing any colour other than red and blue. Medic was talking to his BLU counterpart by the refreshment table. Both of them were wearing hideous Hawaiian shirts that would look better burning in a furnace, but they didn’t resemble each other as much as Sniper had thought they did without their uniforms and regulatory glasses.

Sniper looked around the yard, searching for the BLU Spy, and his gaze happened on a lone figure standing on the other side of the yard.

It had been years since Sniper had seen the BLU Sniper. The BLU Sniper was dressed in an ugly polo shirt that was the colour of mouldy spinach. His tan work boots peaked out from under the legs of his jeans. He was tanner and leaner than he had been in the Gravel War. His eyes were hidden by the pair of shades he was wearing, but Sniper knew from the tilt of his head that he was watching him from across the yard.

Sniper tightened his grip on his beer. It didn’t feel right to be looking back at the BLU Sniper without a rifle in his hands. They had been staring at each other for so long that one of them should be dead on the ground with a bullet in his forehead by now.

“A drink, perhaps?” said a man in a grey suit at Sniper’s elbow, and held out a glass of champagne to Sniper.

It took Sniper longer than he’d like to admit to realise he was looking at his teammate. Spy liked to pretend otherwise but his ski-mask didn’t hide much of his face, and he was too vain to use padding under his mask to hide the contours of his face. But after the effort Spy had spent on wearing his mask at all times around his team, Sniper hadn’t been expecting Spy to show his face at the party.

Sniper took the glass from him. “Thanks.”

“Not a problem,” Spy said, and slipped back into the midst of the party.

The BLU Sniper had looked away and turned his attention in Heavy’s direction.

Although their party invitations allowed it, so far no one at the party asides from Soldier and the BLU Scout had brought a plus-one. Spy was navigating through the crowd alone, without the company of the woman that had been the subject of much discussion at the RED base. Soldier was wearing a tie and a military dress uniform and holding hands with a tall woman that towered over him in a black dress and shared Heavy’s cheekbones and eyes.

The BLU Scout’s girlfriend, on the other hand, looked a lot like Miss Pauling. She wore a pair of thick-rimmed glasses and kept her hair up in a bun. The BLU Soldier had been starting to say something about it before he had been knocked out by a pebble that came from nowhere. The lovebirds were feeding each other Buffalo wings when Sniper sidled past them to grab a plate of ribs. They seemed smitten enough, so Sniper kept his trap shut and retreated back to his side of the yard.

He looked around the crowd again and checked his watch. Fifteen minutes past one and the starting time of the party.

Should have known the BLU Spy would be late.

“Did anyone see where Pyro and Pyro have gone off to?” Engineer said.

Sitting on a folded chair that was far too small for him, Heavy was tending to the barbecue pit in Engineer’s place. He flipped the sausages with a pair of tongs and said, “You say to them to play with dog instead of fire here.

“Well, they ain’t with Daisy.” Engineer wiped his sweaty face and grumbled, “They better not be trying to burn down my ranch.”

As it turned out, a ranch was filled with things that could be used to burn it down and no one had any idea where the two Pyros were. A wave of mild panic swept through the crowd and Scout was yelling for Engineer to ring the fire brigade before everyone died a fiery death.

“Calm yourself, boy,” Spy said. “I have an idea.”

Engineer ended up setting up a bonfire in an empty barrel on a patch of dry soil not far from the yard. It didn’t take long before the two Pyros were lured out of the stables by the fire. Back under the sun, they put their floppy hats on their masked heads and rubbed their gloved hands over the fire and made muffled noises at each other.

Sniper finished his pork ribs and let the old Rottweiler that came sniffing at the guys chewed on his fingers.

He checked his watch again.

Nearly one thirty.

Between the Pyro scare and a fuss over the barbecue fire going out, Soldier loudly announced that Zhanna and himself had been officially married five minutes ago.

There was much confusion. Heavy was questioning his sister in rapid Russian, Engineer was feeding coals into the barbecue pit, and everyone else was stuffing themselves with the new batch of steaks that Spy was rescuing from the grill.

So Sniper was the only one to see the black Mustang driving up to the gate of the ranch, and he knew who it was before the BLU Spy stepped out of the rental in a brown tweed suit.

The BLU Spy had grown out his hair. He wore it to the back of his neck, combed back from his forehead and fluffed in a style that was a decade too young for him. He had lost the ridiculous tan lines he used to have on his face.

Sniper’s chest throbbed. It felt tight and hot, right over the scars where Medic had cut into him to bring him from the dead.

But none of the other REDs recognised the BLU Spy without his mask. When the BLU Spy showed Engineer his invitation card, Engineer threatened to chase him off of the ranch with a red-hot barbecue fork. The situation had to be defused by Heavy interfering on Spy’s account. Heavy told off Engineer for breaking his own rules about no fighting and no weapon in the party.

Engineer returned to the barbecue pit in a huff, and grabbed his tongs back from Spy, who yielded it up with raised hands.

“Many thanks,” the BLU Spy said, straightening his tie.

“This is party for everyone. I am not doing it for you,” Heavy said.

His frown deepened when he noticed that Soldier and Zhanna had disappeared from the party. But Sniper had his eyes fixed on the BLU Spy, and watched him head towards the refreshments and change his mind when Demoman and the BLU Soldier climbed onto the table and slurred that they were best mates forever and would never be parted.

Sniper wiped the sweat and dog slobber off of his hands on his shirt. He would do this. He was a stone-cold assassin, not a damn schoolboy.

“Hello,” a dark-haired young woman said, stopping before him. She was tall, curvy, and had a strong face. Probably Russian too, if the hawkish stare that Heavy was giving him from the barbecue pit was any indication. “I am Bronislava. My brother said much about you.”

“Did he?” Sniper said. As far as he knew, the only times his teammates had anything to say about him were when they were on fire and Sniper threw jarate on them to put out their fire. A bunch of ungrateful wankers, they all were.

“He said you hunt. Use guns and arrows, yes?” Bronislava said. “We don’t have guns in mountains, so we use bare hands. Knives too.”

“Nothing wrong with using knives. Knives are effective.”

“But many guns in America. It is good chance to try,” Bronislava said with a widening smile. No one was ever that happy when talking to him. Not unless they’d been hearing the wrong things about him. “I could use teacher with sniper rifle.”

Was that a pick-up line? It sounded like one, but he couldn’t be sure. When he picked up people at the pub, he asked for the price. If it wasn’t too expensive, he’d shake on the deal and get on with it. None of this wishy-washy stuff. Heavy hadn’t taken his eyes off of him, and it was making the hair on the back of his neck rise.

“Sorry, ma’am, you got the wrong guy. You’ll want the bloke over there. He’s the sniper.” Sniper pointed at BLU Sniper, who was being smothered in the BLU Demoman’s arms. “The one in the puke green shirt.”

“Oh. You’re not sniper?” Bronislava said.

“Nah,” Sniper said. “Heard it’s a good job though.”

Sniper left before his misdirection back-fired in his face. Hell, the BLU Sniper should thank him for letting him have the chance to hook up with a gorgeous Russian, but Sniper wasn’t going to hold his breath for it. Sniper would be fine with walking out of this party with his head intact.

He headed to the back of the yard, where a line of thick trees provided cool cover from the Texas sun. The balloons that had been hanging from the branches had been popped, leaving shredded pieces of colourful rubber dangling in the wind. Beyond the line of trees, outside the painted fence that ringed the backyard, were cows grazing on the pastures that stretched over the hills behind the house as far as the eye could see.

The view belonged on a postcard; it’d been even prettier in the early mornings when Sniper had climbed out of his bed in Engineer’s guestroom to take a leak. But Sniper hadn’t come to the party to see the cows.

The BLU Spy was leaning against the fence and smoking by himself. After these years, he still smoked cigarettes that smelled like burnt trash.

“You’ve gotten rounder,” Sniper said.

“Pardon?” Spy said.

“Rounder around the belly,” Sniper said. “About time middle age catches up with ya.”

Spy rolled his eyes. “Yes. It’s good to see you too.”

His cheeks weren’t as thin as they had been during the Gravel War. He looked pampered and well-fed. Sniper would tell him the look suited him if he didn’t think Spy’s head could get any bigger than it already was. “So how’s life been treating you?”

“Rather well, I’d say. I have a new job where I kill people who don’t come back to life to shoot at me,” Spy said. “And I don’t have to wash blood and piss and non-milk out of my suits every night.”

“How is that a job?” Sniper said. “It sounds more like a bloody vacation.”

“A vacation where I get paid to kill people, yes,” Spy said, flicking ashes off of the end of his cigarette. “I heard it’s less exciting than picking up money that drops out of dead robots, but it’s a living. How have you been?”

“I went home just before my parents kicked the bucket,” Sniper said. “I met my birth parents, who turned out to be kiwis. Then I died, and Medic resurrected me like it was Easter Sunday and I was Jesus bloody Christ!”

“Well.” Spy rolled his cigarette between his fingers. He took a moment to answer that meant he was searching for words. “You look fine to me.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you see my scars.” Sniper tugged his shirt collar open. Once he realized his neckline wasn’t showing anything below his neck, he pulled up his shirt instead. “He put a Y-incision in my chest and wouldn’t heal it up afterwards, y’know, like a proper doctor.”

“Yes, I see,” Spy said. “You can keep your shirt on. Please, lower your voice before they start shooting at us in a drunken stupor.”

“It’s the principle of the matter,” Sniper grumbled, tucking his shirt into his trousers. “You don’t get Y-incisions carved into your chest ‘less you’re going into the freezer.”

“You’re a fool to expect better from him. He never is a very good doctor,” Spy said.

Sniper took out his own pack of cigarettes, struck a match on the fences that Spy was leaning against, and lit a cigarette. Talking made Sniper exercise the muscles in his mouth that he didn’t usually use, and he didn’t enjoy the feel of his tongue in his mouth. “You still bitter about the head-in-the-fridge thing?”

“Of course, I’ll be bitter about it till the hour of my death,” Spy said. “Or until I get my revenge. Whichever comes first.”

“You’ll get back at him someday,” Sniper said. He tilted his head back and watched the smoke from his cigarette dissipated into the sky. “I’ve known you ain’t the type to give up easy since the first time I saw you.”

“I doubt you saw me when I backstabbed you on our first day in Teufort,” Spy said. “Or was it Dustbowl?”

“Nah. It was before the fighting started. I don’t know if you remember, but they sent several of us from each team to get together for a group photo,” Sniper said. “I was standing at the back ‘cause of my hat. You were standing on my left. I knew then that you’d be my enemy.”

Spy blew out a mouthful of smoke. “The colours of our uniforms must have given it away.”

“That ain’t it,” Sniper said. “It was in your eyes. I could see it. The way you looked at the camera. You don’t stop till you get what you want, and I ain’t one to give in without a fight.”

It was too easy to keep talking once he got going. Maybe it was warmth sunlight on his shoulders or maybe it was the acrid smoke on his tongue, but it loosened him up enough to say what he didn’t get a chance to years ago in the dingy gas station.

“Too much personality in one house, my mum used to say,” Sniper said. “That was how I knew we wouldn’t work out before we got started.”

Spy was regarding Sniper with pale eyes. For once, he was quiet and didn’t have the cigarette clamped between his teeth. He was holding it in front of his face, and the sleeve of his jacket rode up his arm high enough for Sniper to see the large wristwatch that Spy was wearing. The watch had silver hands ticking on a black dial. Nothing like the watch that Spy had given back to Sniper at the gas station and Sniper had lost between the packing and unpacking he’d done when fending off Gray Mann’s robot invasion.

Behind them at the party, someone was yelling for Medic to keep his bone saw away from the horses or else there’d be a reckoning.

“A little late for your speech, isn’t it, Mundy?” Spy said.

“That depends on how you see it,” Sniper said.

“How so?”

Sniper shrugged. “It could be an early speech. Before we got started. This time I’m putting it up front so no one gets any nasty surprises.”

Spy stuck his cigarette in his mouth and harrumphed, “I see. What a clumsy, long-winded way to say you want a second chance.”

“You said I didn’t tell you nothing, so I’m telling you now,” Sniper said.

“It has only taken four years. Congratulations are in order.”

“I would’ve gotten it out sooner if you had left a phone number that bloody worked. I tried looking for you,” Sniper shot back.

“ _Sacré bleu._ ” Spy sighed. “We deserve each other.”

“Is that a yes or do I have to guess?”

“Consider it a maybe. I’m not a fan of lost causes,” Spy said, wrapping a hand around Sniper’s arm. He had an infuriating curl to his lips that Sniper didn’t know whether to bite or kiss. “Come, let us enjoy the labourer’s hospitality. Then you’ll have the rest of this weekend to convince me to make an exception for you.”


End file.
